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$0.46 vs $16.40. can you see the difference?
Gemini 4 Argon and Claude Opus 5.5 take on Harbor Jelly - tiny boats, port cranes and water you can’t stop playing with
Claude clearly spent more time at the shipyard. more detail, a busier town, prettier water. but Gemini got a whole little harbor running for 46 cents 😭
is the extra polish worth almost 36× the cost?
NinjaCodex retweeted
One prompt - two passion fruits. And Opus takes the jelly crown again 👑
For $10.91, it delivered juicy colors, textured skin, and pulp you just want to poke. Everything stretches, jiggles, and looks delicious
Astra needed two rounds of fixes: the insides were separating and showing through the skin, and changing the color literally spawned a new fruit. After the fixes, the estimated API cost hit $27.45
2.5x the price, yet Opus still looks juicier
So what exactly are we paying extra for? 👀
Claude Opus 5.5 built this little football yard for $6.06
Real 3D with a pixel-art look: the kids decide what to do with the ball, while physics handles shots and bounces. There’s even a dog that steals the ball
PROMPT:
Build a single-page web toy called "Yard Box": a real-time 3D scene rendered as pixel art, showing a courtyard football box behind a four-storey panel apartment block on a floating island. Use three.js r160 (ES module via import map from jsDelivr, plus BufferGeometryUtils). English UI. Original design only — no real brands, places or logos.
RENDERING PIPELINE (the core look)
- Orthographic camera at an isometric angle (elevation ≈31°, azimuth π/4, rotatable in 90° steps with smooth easing; drag sideways or buttons to turn; wheel/pinch zoom 0.7–2.6).
- Render into a small WebGLRenderTarget (half-float, nearest filtering, depth texture) — about 480×300 art pixels at pixel size 3 — no anti-aliasing. Fit the island + the top of the block into the screen area left free by the UI, and snap the camera so the world origin lands on a whole art pixel (static things never shimmer).
- Post-pass ShaderMaterial: texelFetch whole-pixel upscale; depth-based outlines (a pixel > ~0.5 m in front of a neighbour darkens ×0.5); quantize every pixel to the nearest of a fixed ~60-colour palette in OKLab (lightness weighted ×1.35); optional 4×4 Bayer dither (off by default); empty depth = page background colour.
- "Raw 3D" toggle shows the full-resolution MSAA render without steps above. Controls: pixel size slider 2–6, palette / dither / outlines checkboxes.
- Palette: warm concrete greys, cool greys for snow in shade/moonlight, snow and sky blues, turf greens, autumn olives, yellows/oranges/rusts, team reds and blues, skin and wood tones, lamp/window yellows, dusk violets, mint for the boards.
LIGHT AND TIME
- Directional sun/moon with hard BasicShadowMap (2048), hemisphere fill, point lights for two streetlamps (decay 2) and weak doorway lamps. Presets Day / Dusk / Night blended over 1.6 s. Glow materials lerp between on/off colours.
- The block's facade uses an emissive map drawn on a canvas; at night windows glow warm or cool, and random flats switch lights on and off.
WORLD (all boxes, cylinders, extrusions; textures drawn texel by texel on canvases)
- Rounded floating slab: grass top over soil over rock.
- Football box: rounded-rectangle boards (22×12 m, mint green, plank lines, a gate with an open door), netting on posts above the boards at both ends, mini goals (3 m × 2 m) with alpha-tested nets, turf texture with mowing stripes, worn goalmouths/centre and white markings.
- Panel block along one long side: 4 floors, facade drawn panel by panel with windows and curtains, two entrances with canopies, random balconies, roof details; an asphalt strip with two benches and hedges.
- Dollhouse cut: when the camera looks from the block's side, hide the floors, roof, balconies and canopies and show a section of the ground floor instead — low cut walls with a dark cap, rooms with coloured floors, rugs, sofas, tables, wardrobes, TVs (glowing at night), pot plants, stairwells with steps and post boxes; room floors glow warm at night.
- Playground (swing that actually swings, slide, sandbox), birches with white trunks and dark marks, painted-tyre flower beds, a parked car, a washing line with swaying sheets, two lamp posts.
PEOPLE AND DOG
- Kids as rigs of ~17 boxes (bigger heads), posed every frame with two-bone IK: running stride, kicks keyed as back-swing → strike → follow-through, keeper stance, sideways dives, catch/hold/throw, goal celebrations (airplane arms).
- Three grandmothers sitting on the benches (cheer on goals), a small kid on the swing.
- A box-built dog that lives by the benches.
GAME LOGIC
- 3v3: two field players + one keeper per team (RED attacks +x, BLUE −x), first to 5, then a new game; scoreboard with score, game number, status line and games won.
- Kick-off from the centre; open play with dribbling by small touches, passes leading the receiver, shots aimed inside a post at random height with angular error growing with distance and pressure, tackles; players get behind the ball before kicking (feed-forward on a rolling ball), squeeze in at an angle when the ball is against the boards, avoid goal frames; a scramble poke if nobody can reach a still ball for 3.5 s.
- Keepers hold position, come out for slow loose balls, read shots after a 0.1–0.3 s reaction delay with some error, dive, catch or parry.
- Ball physics in 4 substeps: gravity, ground bounce (lower in winter), boards (lively below rail height, dead in the netting above), posts and crossbar, the goal net, legs in the way. Status flashes: GOAL!, SAVED!, WHAT A SAVE!, OFF THE POST!, OFF THE BOARDS, TACKLE.
- Every 100–170 s (or on a button) the dog runs in through the gate, grabs the ball, runs loops away from the kids for ~5 s, drops it and trots home; it gives up if the game resets.
SEASONS (Summer / Autumn / Winter)
- Summer: poplar fluff drifting. Autumn: yellow/orange canopies, leaves falling from the birches, leaf litter on the ground, olive grass. Winter: snow on the ground, roofs, benches, car and boards; bare trees; falling snow and kicked-up snow spray; kids wear hats; the ball turns orange.
INPUT AND UI
- Click the player on the ball to shoot, his teammate to pass, the pitch to make him dribble there; keys S, P, D, Space, Q/E or arrows.
- Layout: title and caption top-left, lit pixel-font scoreboard top-centre, a narrow control rail on the right (Time, Season, Game, View), a hint bottom-left, a fold-out "How it's drawn" panel bottom-right. Fonts: Silkscreen, Rubik, JetBrains Mono. Light and dark themes via CSS tokens; on phones everything stacks under the scene. WebGL2 fallback card.
NinjaCodex retweeted
A basketball court built by Claude Opus 5.5 for $10.1 🏀
A tiny pixel-art diorama with a game in motion: players run across the court, take shots, and put points on the scoreboard
You can zoom in, change the time of day, and turn on the rain. As evening falls, the lights come on and reflections appear on the court - giving this little neighborhood scene a whole new atmosphere
The video captures 18 seconds of its little world
What do you think of the result for $10.1? 👀
NinjaCodex retweeted
Opus at $13.4 vs Astra at $23.51 - who made the better plush lobster? 🦞
Top - Claude Opus 5.5. Bottom - ChatGPT-6 Astra.
Opus nailed the physics and fur: the body has a soft, satisfying bounce, and the fur looks genuinely fluffy - you actually want to touch it
Astra has a funny face, mismatched eyes, and a personality of its own. Looks like it’s already been through a lot
But for physics and that plush-toy feel, my vote goes to Opus. At almost half the price, too
Which one’s your favorite - top or bottom? 👇
NinjaCodex retweeted
The jelly king found a knife 🍉🔪
Claude Opus 5.5 turned my jelly watermelon into the most distracting thing in my browser. Slice it up, pull the pieces apart, throw them around. Every chunk keeps bouncing like nothing happened
The watermelon cost $4.46. Adding the knife and cutting physics took another $8. Total: $12.46
The knife cost more than the watermelon, but cutting it up is the best part
NinjaCodex retweeted
A volcanic island you want to keep shaking until something erupts 🌋
Claude Opus 5.5 vs. ChatGPT-6 Astra - who built the better jelly island?
Claude grabs your attention with the water physics, shoreline foam and richer textures. Astra added more detail to the island, but the cliffs and buildings look rough up close
API costs:
Claude Opus 5.5 - 24.34$
ChatGPT-6 Astra - 25.44$
Who won this round?
NinjaCodex retweeted
One of these whales has definitely eaten the instructions
GPT-6 Astra vs Claude Opus 5.5 - same prompt, two very different whales
Opus made a cute beluga-whale mix. Astra made a googly-eyed idiot that’s 50% mouth. No thoughts. Just krill 😭
Astra: $9.12
Opus: $13.60
Which one are you taking home?
NinjaCodex retweeted
The jelly king keeps surprising me 🍑
Claude Opus 5.5 made this jelly peach for $7.11. The juicy flesh stretches and squishes, the pit pops out, and I could stare at these colors and textures forever
It all runs right in the browser. Which fruit should be next? 👀
A fluffy pumpkin by Claude Opus 5.5 for $8.41 🎃
One HTML file built with three.js: 64 layers of underfur and 60,000 individual hairs. The fur bounces as you rotate it and gently sways - makes you want to pet it
PROMPT
Build a single self-contained HTML page (no build step) called "Fluffy Pumpkin": an interactive 3D pumpkin covered in long orange fur, rendered with WebGL using three.js r147 (UMD: cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@0…) and custom ShaderMaterials. All UI text in English. Font: Onest (Google Fonts) with system fallbacks.
LOOK
- Full-screen canvas on a warm peach studio background: vertical gradient #E4B79C → #F0CAB3 (lighter band mid-screen) → #E0AD8F.
- Pumpkin body: a sphere squashed vertically (height 0.68 of the width) with 10 lobes. Grooves between lobes pushed in ~13%, lobes slightly fuller, a deep dimple under the stem and a shallow dimple at the blossom end. Start in a gentle 3/4 view (−0.35 rad around Y, 0.06 rad tilt), camera FOV 30°, pumpkin plus stem filling ~88% of the height.
- Stem: a thick, curved, ribbed green stem (7 twisting ridges, dark valleys #2B401A, ridges #6B803D, paling toward the tip #A3A166), flared where it meets the pumpkin, rising and bending to one side, ending in a pale beige domed cut cap (#CCC799) with a star of fibres.
- One directional light from upper-left-front: wrap diffuse, Kajiya-Kay anisotropic highlight along the hair tangent, darker roots and darker grooves (occlusion), slight per-hair brightness variation, a soft warm rim.
FUR (must look crisp, never blurry)
- Fur length 0.2 units. Hairs grow along the normal, then comb from the stem down each lobe and PART along every groove (hair on each side leans toward its own lobe), plus gravity, so on the underside the fur spreads out like a star from the centre.
- Colours: skin #8F3612, roots #BD4F1F, body #FF8C47, tips #FFB375. Each hair takes one colour from root to tip.
- Undercoat: ~64 instanced shells of the body mesh. Procedural hair cells in UV space sized to ~3.4 device pixels at the default view (density follows screen size and pixel ratio), two populations (long + fine underfur), locks that clump toward the tips, analytic anti-aliased coverage, alpha blended, shells write depth. A separate opaque skin layer underneath. Fade shells out where the surface is seen edge-on and discard faint fragments, so no dotted rim or ring appears at the outline.
- Guard hairs: ~60,000 individual tapered camera-facing ribbons (instanced, 7 segments) following the same bend function, minimum width ~0.75 px. Draw them twice: before the shells and after them (depth-tested, no depth write), so the top coat stays crisp and faint edge fur never cuts holes in it.
- Always render at the full device pixel ratio (max 2) and NEVER lower it for performance. If frames are slow, reduce the shell count first (down to 32), then the guard-hair count.
INTERACTION
- Drag to rotate freely (trackball style) with inertia after a flick. The fur lags behind the rotation through a damped spring and flops back. Gentle idle breeze; after 3 s without input, a slow auto-turn.
- Mouse wheel / pinch zooms with a smooth dolly; close up you can see individual hairs. Double-click or "0" resets with an eased animation. Arrow keys rotate.
- Custom cursor: the native grab hand plus a thin dark 46 px ring that follows the pointer and shrinks while dragging. Hovering over the pumpkin gently parts the fur under the cursor, as if stroking it.
- Respect prefers-reduced-motion (no idle spin, no breeze).
UI & ROBUSTNESS
- Bottom-left caption: "Fluffy Pumpkin" and a hint "Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoom · Double-click to reset" (on touch devices: "Drag to rotate · Pinch to zoom") that fades after the first interaction.
- Guard against a zero-sized container at load: clamp width/height to at least 1, and every frame recover from any non-finite camera distance or rotation state.
- Show a small on-page note if the WebGL context is lost or a shader fails to compile, and a fallback message if WebGL is unavailable.
NinjaCodex retweeted
Just look at this difference 🥑
Claude Opus 5.5 vs ChatGPT-6 Astra - jelly avocado, same prompt
Claude Opus 5.5 is on another level here: vibrant colors, textured skin, and flesh you just want to squish. Look at how it stretches and deforms
ChatGPT-6 Astra’s materials look simpler, and it feels much less jelly-like
Honestly, I think Opus is unbeatable at jelly physics right now. Show me even one model that can get close to this result 👀
NinjaCodex retweeted
Gemini 4 Argon built this little Japanese station for $0.33. Claude Opus 5.5 cost almost 32 times as much 🌸🚃
Gemini 4 Argon vs Claude Opus 5.5
Claude Opus 5.5 looks better: softer cherry blossoms, rounded hills, and cozy lighting at night
But an entire station with a train and a day/night cycle for just 33 cents from Gemini 4 Argon is pretty impressive
API cost:
Gemini 4 Argon - $0.33
Claude Opus 5.5 - $10.54
At these prices, I’d pick Gemini 4 Argon. What about you? 👀
NinjaCodex retweeted
Did Claude Opus 5.5 just crush everyone again? Although GPT-6.1 Sol at $2.80 has something to say 🌊
Four models built a marine lagoon right in the browser: sharks, whales, rays, splashes, and whirlpools
Visually, Claude Opus 5.5 is my favorite. The water, reefs, and shadows make it feel like real shallow water. But GPT-6.1 Sol did a great job for the price: simpler visuals at roughly one-fifth of the cost
Gemini 4 Argon built its version for just 22 cents. But honestly, it looks terrible. The price is more impressive than the result
GPT-6 Astra was the most expensive. Looking at the visuals alone, I wouldn’t have guessed
API cost:
Claude Opus 5.5 - $14.70
Gemini 4 Argon - $0.22
GPT-6.1 Sol - $2.80
GPT-6 Astra - $22.54
For visuals, I’m picking Claude Opus 5.5. For value, GPT-6.1 Sol. What exactly are we paying $22.54 for here?
NinjaCodex retweeted
Making a fluffy watermelon - $8.97. Adding fluff inside, a knife, and slicing - another $13.65 😂🔪🍉
Asked Claude Opus 5.5 to make my watermelon fluffy on the inside too and add a knife. Now I can cut it into fuzzy little pieces and toss them around right in the browser
Estimated API cost: $8.97 for the fluffy watermelon + $13.65 for the fluffy flesh, knife, and slicing = $22.62
Slicing the watermelon cost more than creating it. But I can’t stop playing with it lol
Opus costs 26.4 times as much. But does its watermelon look 26 times better?
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Gemini 4 Argon. Fluffy 3D watermelons you can rotate and zoom into right in your browser
Opus has longer, fuller fur with beautiful highlights. Gemini has shorter fur, sharper stripes, and a cleaner silhouette
API cost:
Claude Opus 5.5 - $8.98
Gemini 4 Argon - $0.34
For the fur, I’d pick Opus. But for 34 cents, Gemini looks pretty impressive
Would you pay an extra $8.64 for more fluff?
$8.88 for the Maldives. the catch? you can’t leave the browser
Claude Opus 5.5 built this interactive ocean with shimmering water, rays gliding over the sand, and translucent jellyfish
not a looping video. the scene runs in real time: add creatures, toggle rain, or trigger a whirlpool and watch them react
the details sell it: moving light patterns on the seabed, ripples on the surface, and the way the rays’ fins bend as they swim
Did Opus just destroy Astra again? 🌊
Astra: $27.84, including a $9.79 revision just to improve realism and make the rays and jellyfish feel submerged
Opus: $9.06. First try. Better water, lighting, and depth
A better-looking ocean for less than a third of the price.
Astra’s fix alone cost more than Opus’s entire result
For me, Opus has no equal in visual tasks right now
What exactly is Astra charging extra for? 👀
prompt:
Build a single self-contained HTML file (inline CSS and JS; the only external script is Three.js r128 from cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/li…) called "Maldives Lagoon": an interactive top-down view of a turquoise Maldives lagoon with a white beach, a coral reef edge and the deep ocean beyond it. The user releases rays and jellyfish into the sea and watches them swim. Output the complete file, no placeholders, no omitted sections.
CAMERA AND LAYOUT
- Perspective camera straight overhead (height ~19, up vector (0,0,-1)). Fit the vertical FOV so the screen shows about ±6.2 world units in the short direction; the long direction scales with the aspect ratio.
- Recompute everything on resize: layout, simulation and baked textures.
- Geography in screen space:
- Top-left corner: a curved white-sand beach (shore signed-distance field = an ellipse centred just off the corner, edge broken up with noise).
- Most of the screen: the shallow lagoon, ~0.05 m at the waterline deepening to ~2.2.
- A reef edge running diagonally across the far part of the screen (second SDF, a large noisy ellipse).
- Bottom-right corner, beyond the reef: a drop-off to the deep ocean (depth up to ~7, dark blue).
WATER SIMULATION
- GPU ripple height field (ping-pong half-float render targets, ~360 texels on the long side, 90 Hz). Update: neighbour average, velocity += (avg − h)*1.8, velocity *= 0.9935, h += velocity, h *= 0.9993. Absorbing sponge edges at the screen borders; zero height on the beach.
- Queued drops (x, z, radius, amplitude, foam) with a smooth cosine bump; a foam channel that diffuses and fades.
STATIC BAKES (render to textures once per resize)
- Sea floor:
- Rippled sand with warped wave crests.
- Seagrass patches and rubble scattered near the reef.
- Coral heads as Voronoi domes, densest along the reef edge: brain/plate colours, knobbly texture, little shading crevices.
- A few orange starfish.
- Pale sand near the beach.
- The alpha channel stores a lighting term.
- Beach overlay: dry white sand with grain and slight dunes, a darker wet band near the water, a few shells. Baked as RGBA and composited by the surface pass.
RENDERING (per frame)
1. A tileable animated caustics texture (512², mipmapped).
2. A shadow pass: creatures projected along the sun onto the floor, into a half-res target with MAX blending.
3. The underwater scene into an off-screen target (alpha = depth*0.25):
- Floor mesh displaced by the depth function.
- Lighting: ambient + sun × caustics focused by the ripple Laplacian × shadows × a swaying palm-tree shadow.
- Water tint: strong red absorption, so shallow water is vivid turquoise and deep water dark ocean blue, e.g. T = exp(−(0.72, 0.078, 0.05)·path − extra absorption below 2.4 m), scatter blending from turquoise (0.03, 0.30, 0.36) to deep blue (0.01, 0.12, 0.34) with depth.
- Bubbles and silt clouds.
4. A full-screen water-surface pass:
- Normal from the ripple field + scrolling wind ripples + a long swell rolling in toward the beach.
- Refraction with chromatic split and depth blur, Fresnel sky reflection with clouds, sun glints, splash craters, foam, a whirlpool funnel with spiral foam arms.
- White surf breaking along the reef edge in time with the swell.
- The shore: each wave breaks, rushes up the beach as a foamy lacy swash, then drains back, leaving a thin shining water film and a wet sheen on the sand.
- The palm shadow (trunk plus 8 drooping fronds, gently swaying) falls across beach and water.
- Composite the baked beach on top; light vignette and tone curve.
5. An overlay pass after the surface: creatures in the air, water droplets (point sprites), rain streaks, expanding rings, soft dark shadow blobs on the water under airborne creatures, a drop-target marker.
CREATURES (procedural, instanced per species, each drawn in under-water, in-air and shadow passes)
- Rays:
- Flat bodies built as two thin sheets meeting at the margin, plus a tail tube and cephalic fins for the manta.
- Wings bend along the span with a wave that travels from body to tip, lagging toward the tip. Translucent wing tips; eyes; white belly underneath.
- Species:
1. Manta, "Giant glider": huge black-backed diamond wings with white shoulder patches, slow powerful flaps, long glides, occasional breach with a somersault and a belly-flop splash.
2. Spotted eagle ray, "White-spotted": dark back covered in white spots, pointed wings, very long thin tail, quick flaps, also breaches.
3. Blue-spotted stingray, "Blue-spotted": small oval ochre disc with electric-blue spots. It stays near the bottom, rests on the sand, kicks up silt clouds when it settles or startles, and has a rippling wing-edge swim.
- Jellyfish:
- A pulsing bell (contract–relax cycle with a thrust phase) plus camera-facing ribbon tentacles and frilly oral arms that trail and sway behind the bell.
- Translucent: fresnel rim, soft inner glow, see-through.
- They drift with currents, slowly tilt the bell toward a random swim direction, and stay below the surface and above the floor.
- Species:
4. Moon jelly, "Glass saucer": wide flat clear bell with four pink-lilac horseshoe gonads, short fringe of hair tentacles, short oral arms.
5. Sea nettle, "Long tentacles": taller amber-orange bell with radial stripes, long thin red-brown tentacles and long ruffled cream oral arms (the tentacles reach several body lengths).
BEHAVIOUR
- Rays use wander steering inside the sea (avoid the beach and the screen edges), with separation and a preferred depth band per species (stingrays on the bottom, manta and eagle ray mid-water over deeper areas).
- They swim faster when startled and get pulled by the whirlpool and a gentle ocean current.
- Releasing a creature: tap its card and it is thrown from the card position along a ballistic arc to a random free spot in water deep enough for it. It hits the water with a splash (crater, rings, droplet crown, bubbles, sound), dives and starts swimming; jellies flip upright as they sink and start pulsing.
- Dragging a card holds the creature above the water under the pointer, with a target ring and a shadow blob; releasing drops it there.
- Tapping or dragging across the water makes ripples, startles nearby rays (they dart away; stingrays lift off the sand in a silt puff) and nudges jellies.
UI (English)
- Frosted-glass dock at the bottom: 5 creature cards with thumbnails rendered from the real models. Tool buttons: Rain, Whirlpool (draggable), Calm, Clear sea (creatures swim off and fade), Sound, Hide UI.
- Top-left name plate "Maldives Lagoon" with a live creature count; toast messages and a hint line ("Tap a creature to release it, or drag it into the sea").
- Sound is synthesized with Web Audio: surf rushing up the beach in step with the swash cycle, splashes, plinks, rain, whirlpool gurgles, soft ambient water.
- Keyboard shortcuts R W C M H.
QUALITY
- Works on desktop and mobile (pointer events, touch, no horizontal overflow) and in WebGL2 and WebGL1.
- Adaptive pixel ratio.
- Start with a few creatures already in the sea: two mantas, an eagle ray, two stingrays resting on the sand, a few moon jellies and a sea nettle.


